Spoilers Crisis on Infinite Earths Discussion (CW Event Spoiler Thread)

You're all thinking 3 dimensionaly. In a new (multi-) universe created here, when the Paragons are returned to their time it's a new history for the existing worlds. There was no Earth-1, Earth-2, Earth-38, etc... This is how the universe always was since the dawn of (Oliver) time. The Creator (Oliver) made it so all the Paragons will be born/created on one Earth (Prime).

 

Correction -- the closing montage showed that Earth-2 (home of Stargirl), Earth-96 (home of the Paragon Superman), and the others still exist as distinct realities (and obviously the DCEU, Lucifer, etc. will remain distinct as well). The only merged worlds were Earth-1, Earth-38, and Black Lightning's Earth. So all of the Paragons except Superman-96 are now native to Earth-Prime.

And yes, we all know that the history has been rewritten so that they've always been one world. That much was explained clearly in Part 5, and of course in the original comics story. But that's how ordinary citizens experience it. The main characters have had their memories restored by J'onn, so the former, separate histories are still going to be narratively relevant for the characters who remember them.

I also disagree with the assumption that Oliver made them one Earth. I doubt he had any such intention. His goal was to restore the Multiverse, all of it. Deliberately merging the worlds wouldn't have saved the "infinitude" of worlds, because it would've wiped out all but one of the versions of each individual with doppelgangers. (In the comic, it was a last-ditch desperation move to save what little was left. By contrast, Oliver was recreating what had already been destroyed -- more like Zero Hour than Crisis, actually.) The merging of the three CW Earths happened by accident, apparently as a side effect of the fact that all seven Paragons (including the ringer Lex) came from Earth-1 and Earth-38 (with BL being the anomaly, perhaps a consequence of his interaction with the antimatter cannon).

 

Oliver only "restored" the Multiverse in that he made a brand-new one rather than only creating a single Earth.

 

Actually all seven Paragons (Batwoman, Ryan Choi, Flash, J'onn J'onzz, Lex Luthor, Supergirl, and White Canary) are on Earth-Prime. The Pre-Crisis Earth-96 Superman was only briefly Paragon.

 

They were Paragons all along. They didn't suddenly become Paragons during the story; they were the Paragons already, simply by virtue of who they were, and it was a matter of locating them. Superman-96 was the real Paragon; Lex got the role fraudulently.

Besides, the statement I was responding to said "all the Paragons." I take that to mean all of them, period, not just the final seven.

Anyway, the point is that only Earth-1, Earth-38, and Earth-BL were merged into Earth Prime, and all the others still exist as separate Earths. Although it's unclear if the Earth-2 we have now is the same as the one we had before.

 

I think it is pretty clear, actually, but we'll have to see exactly what we learn going forward.

 

Suddenly becoming a Paragon is exactly what Lex does.

It doesn't matter that Lex cheated via The Book of Destiny to become a Paragon. By the end of part three he was one and Pre-Crisis Superman-96 wasn't.

Sorry, I was going with how it was presented in the story.

But since you're going with the "Pre-Crisis Superman-96 was one at one point so he counts as one eternally" then you are indeed correct that he's not on Earth-Prime. Though I will point out you got his location wrong. He got wiped with the rest of the multiverse when Lex switched places with him. The Post-Crisis Superman-96 we see at the end is a different version who didn't suffer the tragedy (note the yellow on the belt and emblem) that made the Pre-Crisis one the original Paragon of Truth.

Going by the JSA photo in the most recent Stargirl trailer, Post-Crisis Earth-2 is a new one.

 

It seems like The new Earth 2 is more like comics Earth 2,... with an older generation group (Justice Society) which is just now getting a new generation. It looks like Jay Garrick is from this new Earth 2

 

By unconventional means, so obviously that doesn't apply to the others.

No, I'm just saying that Superman was one of the Paragons depicted in the story. "Eternally?" Where does that come in? This is a story we watched on TV. It had eight characters in it who were Paragons at some point in the story. That's all I meant. Don't overcomplicate it.

That's a pretty bizarre interpretation. From a narrative and emotional standpoint, it was obviously the intent of the storytellers to say "Hey, it's okay, Brandon's Superman isn't really dead, he came back and is happier now." Just replacing him with a completely separate character wouldn't achieve that purpose.

Besides, even if his past did change (and that's just a conjectural interpretation of the costume change, not a clearly established fact), that doesn't mean he's a completely different person. If that were the case, then that would mean that all the characters we knew before Flashpoint died years ago and were replaced by doubles, and that all the non-Paragons now were killed and replaced by doubles. It would be absurd to think that was the storytellers' intent. We're supposed to see characters whose timeline has been altered as the same people they were before, the same people we had emotional attachments to, not total strangers. Diggle and Lyla are still Diggle and Lyla even though their children were rewritten twice. Cisco was still Cisco even though history changed to cause his brother's death. And so on. Thus, it follows that Superman-96 is still Superman-96.

Very possibly. But did they ever explicitly say in past episodes that Earth-2 never had a JSA of its own?

I just think it's interesting that the producers chose to label Stargirl's world as Earth-2. They must've had a reason for doing that. Maybe it's just because they intend to rebroadcast the show on The CW and thought it would simplify things if the CW worlds were Earth-Prime and Earth-2. But it seems that would raise a lot of questions about its relationship with the old Earth-2. So I wonder if there might not be more of a reason than just that. It might be that the new world retains some of the history and attributes of the old Earth-2, e.g. maybe Gorilla City, even if a lot else is altered.

 

One of my big pet peeves of the ArrowVerse is that they switched Earth2 and 3 from the comics.

Jay Garrick is from Earth 2, and while i understand the switch (to keep the dramatic reveal at the end), it made things unneccesarily confusing.

Earth 2 had "evil" versions of many heroes (Black Siren, Reverb, Deathstorm, etc.), while Earth 3 had a previous generation of Heroes (like Jay Garrick). SO i really doubt they had a JSA on Earth 2 previously

With this re-write, this would fix the problem... with Stargirl being a 2nd generation hero. ALso, the photo showed an Earth 2 Jay Garrick if I am not mistaken. So it would be cool if John Wesley Schipp got a chance to guest star there as well.

 

It may seem bizarre but that's essentially what's shown on screen.

The original multiverse got wiped and a new one took its place. Those who were brought are essentially the same characters albeit recreations of them.

Never said he was a completely separate character. He's a recreation of the same character who possibly didn't go through the Joker's gas attack and no longer has Paragon status.

It may not be a clearly established fact his past is a little bit different Post-Crisis but, they went to the effort of explaining why he had black on his emblem. Why do that and then recolor it the traditional yellow for his final shot?
If the color change wasn't meant to be a signifier, in this case a happier version, of some sort then why bother doing it?

There's a big difference between Flashpoint and Crisis.
Flashpoint was temporal shenanigans by Barry that altered things which are badly corrected by the story's end.
Crisis on Infinite Earths wiped out the entire multiverse and replaced it with a new one.

They weren't altered by time. They were wiped out of existence and then recreated. The recreated versions are essentially the same albeit with a quirk or two to compensate for the new multiverse.

Sort of think of them, how they're treated not how they were created, the same way as Harry Kim, Naomi Wildman, and Miles O'Brien. They are the same character but not the original.

They never said they had one. I'm primarily basing it on the classic style Jay Garrick in the JSA photo.

 

QFT.

Earth Prime may be populated with inhabitants from Earth-1, Earth-38, and Earth-73/Earth-BL, but it is not actually any of those 3 Earths; it's a brand-new place created by Oliver and the Paragons from the antimatter-infested wreckage of the original Multiverse.

 

Anyway, a plot hole occurred to me. Sara said in Part 5 that there was nobody left alive who remembered who she was before the Queen's Gambit. And it's true that every major character who knew her then is dead now -- Oliver, Laurel, Quentin, Tommy. But I realized -- what about her mother, Dinah Lance (Alex Kingston)? Last we heard of her, she was still alive, and still a part of Sara's life. Now, the dramatic intent was obvious enough -- having it be a clean break from her past served the emotion of the scene -- but it's still kind of a big oversight to forget (or ignore) that she still has a mother.

 

^ Dinah had died with the rest of Earth-1's population.

 

That's not a plot hole.

It's an apparently inaccurate line of dialogue.

It has no impact on the progress of the story and doesn't impair the logic of events in any way.

 

It's not even an inaccurate line of dialogue because Dinah was dead at the time Sara and Barry were talking.

 

Watching the Batwoman and Supergirl Crisis aftermath, I see there are different versions of people from the other Earths of the Multiverse, like the Brainiacs. Even Beth now lives as a separate entity. Only certain Earths have gotten fused together, so the Multiverse is intact.

 

The hardest part of maintaining a false outbreak wouldn't be the press, it would be the healthcare workers who would be questioning the fact that they weren't seeing the reported outbreak. We may have confidentiality on an individual level, but damn do we talk in more generic terms about what we get up to. You couldn't keep people within the profession from talking to each other short of a total communications blackout, which would in itself arouse suspicions.

In the event of a real outbreak the world tends to know about it long before the press start reporting, even if "the world" is limited to those having the conversation.

Ever lived through one?

People do not "turn off their grief like a switch", they adopt a wide variety of adaptive strategies of which most are fundamentally unhealthy. Someone who can simply disregard the traumas of a war is a rare beast indeed and arguably pathological already.

 

You have to remember that Crisis May have altered events that happened in the past. For all we know that outbreak never happened now.

 

We know that, but apparently the characters don't, since on Supergirl they're talking as if there's only one Earth left. Which is weird.